This Week's Guests:

• Grammy Award nominee Kenny Alphin is better known as Big Kenny of the country duo Big and Rich. Big Kenny and his wife, Christiev, recently traveled to Sudan to bring aid and raise awareness about the humanitarian crisis plaguing the country. Alphin joins Boyd in the studio to talk about his music, his work, and Sudan.

• What Was Promised is a new film by Roshini Thinakaran. The documentary takes a look at the women who joined Iraq’s new security forces after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Thinakaran joins Boyd in the studio to talk about her film that screened at National Geographic’s 2008 All Roads Film Festival.

• National Geographic Traveler magazine is helping you pick your next vacation destination. In the November/December double issue, they’ve rated 109 historic destinations around the world. Keith Bellows, editor in chief of the magazine, joins Boyd in the studio to go over the best and the worst on the list.

• Don’t tell Diego Bunuel’s mother that he’s headed to Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, and other war-torn countries. Bunuel used to work as a French foreign news correspondent. But he decided he wanted to tell the stories of everyday people—and that’s just what he does in his program, Don’t Tell My Mother, airing on the National Geographic International Channel. Bunuel joins Boyd in the studio to recount some of his stories from inside the war zone.

• The Linguists, a new documentary, follows linguists David Harrison and Gregory Anderson on a whirlwind race against time to document endangered languages before the last fluent speaker dies. Harrison and filmmaker Seth Kramer join Boyd in the studio to talk about what they found while making the film.

• Four hundred years ago Galileo made the first telescope to look into the heavens. Today, scientists are using much more powerful telescopes such as the Hubble. A new book from National Geographic and authors David DeVorkin and Robert Smith, Hubble: Imaging Space and Time, reveals more than two hundred of the most spectacular images from the Hubble Space Telescope during its lifetime. DeVorkin is curator for history and astronomy and the space sciences at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, and he joins Boyd to talk about the new book.

• J.J. Kelley and Josh Thomas just finished a 1,200-mile kayak trip from Skagway, Alaska, to Seattle, Washington. Boyd catches up with the two adventurers to talk about the highlights and lowlights of the trip.